Postscript

Geoffrey Cook’s first collection, Postscript, offers intense engagements with particular landscapes—the Canadian Maritimes, familiar and familial, and a politically exhausted late-twentieth century Czechoslovakia. These lucid, elegant, ambitious poems range in tone from the erotic to the elegiac, the skeptical to the sincere. They capture a contemporary sense of uprootedness and a vision of art and love that is both reticent and revelatory. “Geoffrey Cook has given us, quite simply, a new, sometimes astonishing, quite wonderful poetic voice.” —David Adams Richards “Herein lives urgent cadence and eternal excellence.” —George Elliott Clarke “What impresses in Postscript is Cook’s persistent ability to wrestle—from the confluence of feeling and object—an apt form for each of his gentle, often heart-rending songs. From an ill-fitting axe handle to the architecture of Czechoslovakia, these supple lines track life’s losses, finding gains in the private re-makings offered by verse.” —Ken BabstockGeoffrey Cook was born in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and currently teaches in the English Department of John Abbott College in Montreal. His poems have appeared widely in such journals as The Antigonish Review, Descant, Matrix and Pottersfield Portfolio, and in the anthologies of Atlantic Canadian poetry, Landmarks [2001] and Coastlines [2002].

Reviews

“An astonishingly assured and powerful debut… [Cook’s] fierce, fine books gathers cosmo influences; [John] Thompson, but also Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, and Rainer Maria Rilke, while his sonnets may also tender [Charles] Bruce. Even so, he is an original. […] Considering photos of [poet John] Thompson, Cook turns in ghazals as good as those of the Welshman: ‘I jabbed one into mine once: a (spruce) needle straight into the eye / like a sharp stick stabbed into the glassy candy-apple’s core.’ Each couplet possesses the tang and sting of expert imagism: ‘Everything is up against the wall, is cold, / as if black and white were best for poetry.’ […] Cook’s rhymes dazzle: ‘Goldenrod bunches / braid the sun / and unhinge hunches / weighing down / the over-anxious.’ […] Postscript marks a remarkable debut.”-George Elliott Clarke, Halifax Chronicle-Herald

“Bode[s] well for the new generation of Canadian poets… Show[s] that the poetry of place continues to be vital–place as seen through a sojourner’s interval, rather than a visit’s brevity or half a lifetime’s familiarity. This is a poetry of dwelling, of staying in a place long enough to experience relationship, community, and self-change, but not long enough to stop feeling ‘unsettled.'” –Books in Canada

“Cook’s work is cosmopolitan without losing touch with Maritime settings.” –Montreal Review of Books